Slashdot Mirror
The Electronic Police State
gerddie writes "Cryptohippie has published what may be called a first attempt to describe the 'electronic police state' (PDF). Based on information available from different organizations such as Electronic Privacy Information Center, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom House, countries were rated on 17 criteria with regard to how close they are already to an electronic police state. The rankings are for 2008. Not too surprisingly, one finds China, North Korea, Belarus, and Russia at the top of the list. But the next slots are occupied by the UK (England and Wales), the US, Singapore, Israel, France, and Germany." This is a good start, but it would be good to see details of their methodology. They do provide the raw data (in XLS format), but no indication of the weightings they apply to the elements of "electronic police state" behavior they are scoring.
UK is particularly bad, the goverment want to have records of every single phone call, sms, email sent or web page read by every single person in the UK. Needless to say, this is a ridiculously expensive enterprise at a time when the UK's public borrowing is higher than every.
I am sorry, but if you are claiming something to be a report on "national rankings" of "The Electronic Police State", you should at a very least have a clue.
A few hints to the fact that this report is a bunch of crap (no offense to a good name of real crap) is clear lack of understanding of legal concepts, imprecise and not legally or scientifically accepted definitions and simply errors in basic terms and grammar.
It is spelled "habeAs corpus". You do not start a paper that you want to be taken seriously with cheap usenet flame references to "Nazi Germany or Stalin's USSR".
It is not a "criminal evidence" (what the hell is "criminal evidence" anyway?), unless it is admissible in court and no information as collected is admissible on its own merits. And how do you compare countries with completely different legal systems?
I could go on and on, but really it isn't worth the time. This report should not be on a first page of "idle", much less on /. Really, editors - get a clue.
Does freedom mean that you can do anything you want any time you want? Or is freedom the life you lead based upon rules set out by the government?
What does freedom require of you? Is responsibility a facet of freedom? Is societal responsibility actually slavery?
Maybe after we stopped throwing around loaded code words like Freedom and Police State, perhaps we can find that sometimes freedom isn't what we think it ought to be, but that the actual practice of freedom is more humane and invigorating than true freedom.
with no information on how it was compiled
good job
Next up, we'll publish a list of the top 50 mutual funds to invest in...with no mention of the criteria for generating the list.
If you have nothing to hide, government surveillance would not matter at all.
Just stop using the Internet, driving a car, visiting public places, using credit cards, signing up for lists at major US retailers, enrolling in any public organization or institution, talking on a cell phone, renting videos, or getting cable television. This should ensure your basic expectations of privacy are respected.
M
I downloaded the raw data. Some countries are missing, and the results are quite different from the PDF:
59-China
54-United Kingdom: England & Wales
53-Singapore
53-United States of America
52-France
52-Germany
51-Malaysia
50-Ireland
49-Netherlands
49-United Kingdom: Scotland
48-Israel
48-Russia
45-Australia
45-Belgium
45-Japan
44-Austria
44-New Zealand
43-Norway
41-Italy
40-Denmark
40-Taiwan
39-Canada
39-Greece
39-Hungary
39-Switzerland
38-Finland
38-Poland
38-Slovenia
38-Sweden
37-Cyprus
37-Estonia
37-Latvia
37-Lithuania
37-Malta
36-Czech Republic
36-Iceland
36-Luxembourg
36-Portugal
36-Spain
36-South Africa
34-Argentina
33-Romania
32-Thailand
31-Bulgaria
30-Brazil
28-Philippines
27-India
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Go try web browsing in North Korea, let us know if you still feel that way.
The government inspection is not nearly as bad as employer/school policing of your online activities.
My apologies, but I am always shocked when people make the claim that potentially nefarious activities are somehow "more evil" when performed by private actors as opposed by government. What is the basis for your argument?
The government has an absolute monopoly on force. A corporation, no matter how evil, cannot lawfully detain you, lock you in a cage or kill you. The government can do all of those things and more. Your school cannot deprive you of your income, restrict your movements or require that your name be entered on a list of proscribed persons. The government does these things as a matter of course.
Perhaps you feel more in control of your government than you do your employer or school? Good luck with that. You can find another job. You can study elsewhere. Your government is inescapable.
So, if you download their XLS raw data, and add up their scores, the worst 6 nations are:
1. China, with a score of 3.47
2. UK (Englad/Wales), with a score of 3.18
3. US and Singapore (tied for 3rd place), with a score of 3.12
5. France and Germany (tied for 5th place), with a score of 3.06
And as for Israel and Russia -- they are tied for 11th place, with a score of 2.82
Quite different from the top offenders list in the PDF, eh? It gets worse: North Korea and Belarus (in the top 5 according to the PDF) are not even mentioned anywhere in the raw data XLS... So not only did these "experts" pull their data out of their asses, but they managed to fail at adding up their own funny numbers!
After skimming that report, and comparing it with what's on the Cryptohippie website - it looks to me that the document is more of a marketing tool to promote their company. Am I the only one who thinks this?
Here's what the group claims to do: "Cryptohippie USA, Inc. exists to protect individuals and organizations against attacks on privacy by agents of industrial and competitive espionage, organized crime, oppressive governments and even hired hackers. We do this with the best of encryption technologies and a closed group of highly protected networks - for your peace of mind and safety."
Here's what the report posits:
* "In an Electronic Police State...[every electronic flotsam you produce is] criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long long time."
* "Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad"
* The State knows everything you do, a-la Big Brother
They are trying to frame this paranoia into a neat little package, which sets you in the right mood to accept what they have to sell - which is protection against attacks on your privacy.
Classic marketing technique? Sorry, it just looks like another insurance agent to me.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
You forgot to mention traveling on an airplane, traveling on a coach, traveling on Amtrak, holding a bank account, gambling at a casino (they have to take your details so they can tell the IRS if you win and need to pay income tax on that win IIRC) or owning a firearm.
This technology is available to the next Pol Pot, or Idi Amin, or Saddam Hussein. As a dictator, cost is little if any problem - you just tell people to set up the surveillance, and report to you. Not to mention, the US comes awfully close locking up political prisoners sometimes. Remember McCarthy? Just think if HE had access to all this newfangled monitoring equipment. The next George W. Bush may whisk you off to Guantanamo, based on some comment you made online, or in an email. And, people who notice you gone will say, "Well, if he had nothing to hide, he wouldn't have gone missing!"
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Romanes eunt domus!
A quote from the articles' referenced PDF:
1. We really don't see how it is going to hurt us. Mass surveillance is
certainly a new, odd, and perhaps an ominous thing, but we just
don't see a complete picture or a smoking gun.
2. We are constantly surrounded with messages that say, Only crazy
people complain about the government.
As a person who has recently (over the past couple of months) done some review and a lot of reading into Nazi Germany, I can see the same types of Authoritarian trends and psychological tendencies to dismiss the worst case scenarios in "Democratic" countries (I scary-quote the word "Democratic" because there appears to be a cultural assumption that Democracy is necessarily equated with Freedom and justice, which, at the most is an accident. Democracy only assumes voting power (to an extant, for the majority of people), and not Freedom from oppression. I will emphasize that Democracy is generally a more utilitarian means towards Freedom than other forms of government. Benign and beneficent Autocracies would be great if they weren't "Utopian" [that is, mythical] in nature).
There also appears to be a tendency for people to appease authority in order to minimize worst case scenarios.
There also appears to be a tendency for governments to rationalize extremist and authoritarian practices. Hitler (and perhaps more tellingly Goebbels [who wasn't intellectually fanatical against Jews, but realized the value of Fear, Ignorance, and Hatred]) used the Jews as his main propaganda vehicle. The contemporary West uses the "pedophile" and the "terrorist" as the excuse. In both cases the regimes generally tend to have financial support from big businesses and the "conservative" voting class (I don't mean to slight well-meaning Conservatives here, but I am taking my language directly from the history books, some of which are contemporary to the history I am talking about). In both cases (Nazi pre-war Germany and the Authoritarian-leaning democracies of the West) share the same thing: the propagation (propaganda) of fear and nationalism. Think of the children is certainly a motto that Hitler used (I'm not going to bother to look up the references; they've been pointed out before on Slashdot). "Terrorism" too, was used as an excuse by Hitler; granted that much of his terrorism was contrived (like the Russian government bombings of residential buildings. Yes, I am aware that the Russians claim it was the Chechens. Western Intel AFAIK and have heard, seems to think differently).
Like the British and American public of 1930's, and much of Europe for that matter, people rationalized away their fears. The moderates in Germany at the time appeased the authoritarian measures as well. They kept thinking that a giving up a little freedom was politically expedient. Like the famous poem goes, people don't put much thought into things until it happens to them (ref: First they came. Considering the fact the US has the most amount of people in jail than any other country in the world, I would be concerned (A popular and fairly good reference: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2494/does-the-united-states-lead-the-world-in-prison-population). Notice that I'm not talking about secret CIA prisons, MK-ULTRA type covert activities, etc., just the stuff that is well documented. Life is fine if you are "middle-class" and lucky enough not to piss off the wrong people. Don't hold your breath.
1 in 31 people in the U.S. are in prison, on parole or on probation.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469360/
The U.S. has more people in prison that the Peoples Republic of China.
It doesn't really matter if it is an electronic Police state or not.
The RIAA haven't undertaken raids on their own authority, nor have they used their own forces. In these cases, they are influencing government (police SWATs) to use its monopoly on force to "enforce the law". Maybe it's a fine line, but it is a line.
No, it's a blurred line. Corporations write the laws the government enforces, even if not directly.
England is a very curious case. In law its in a situation in which any authoritarian government, having got itself elected, would never need to call another election. There are a host of measures which have been passed in the last ten years which would permit the suspension of Parliament and rule by decree. The terrorism legislation would allow such a government to imprison anyone it liked for any or no reason. Then there is the surveillance, which is on a scale only previously found in science fiction. All travel, all communication (including this post) are logged. Henry Porter's articles in the Guardian and Vanity Fair detail the whole thing. Recently an opposition Member of Parliament was arrested, on Parliament premises, on suspicion of 'conspiring to encourage misconduct in public office'. Well.
Yet, it is obvious that England is a far pleasanter and freer place to live than the countries it is being compared to. Its also obviously, if you look at the recent deep embarrassment of its politicians over expenses, ruled by people who feel accountable to public opinion in a way that none of the true authoritarian states do. You will still find vigorous debate in the media. Only today, for example, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian runs up one side of the Prime Minister and down the other, and calls on the Party to get rid of him in the next three weeks. There will shortly be elections, relatively properly run, and the goverment will take a huge hit, and will accept it.
What has happened is that a genuinely democratic party, elected admittedly on a flawed and not particularly representative electoral system with a minority of the vote, one which consists of pleasant and well meaning people, has gradually without realizing what it is doing, passed legislation which would enable the British National Party, should it ever take power, to be as unrestrained by legislative limits on its powers as the Nazi Party in Germany 1933.
At the moment what stands between the English and either left or right authoritarianism is tradition, an independent judiciary, and the goodwill of the ruling party. We are effectively Weimar, with all the legal framework any future government will need to turn us at will either into Nazi Germany or the GDR.
We just have to hope that the wrong people don't get elected. If they do, its all over.
I put a reference to your insightful comment on the "open manufacturing" mailing list:
"Forfeiting plumbing for self-determination?"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/8462e40751be6966#
What I found interesting in the comment and reply is the perceived tension between relying on (centralized?) manufacturing and freedom.
Anyway, it seems to be the general feeling of slashdot that there is no land one can go to right now to escape these trends (other than perhaps the future. :-)
David Brin suggests in his transparent society that the only alternative to one-way surveillance is for everyone to be able to inspect all surveillance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
In the "utopia" at the end of Marshall Brain's Manna story, there was no anonymity and effectively probably no privacy:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
But that is sort-of like Brin's Transparent Society idea.
Another post in this Slashdot discussion makes the point that "Freedom" and "Justice" are not the same thing as "Democracy" (even if they often may go together). One can wonder if "Privacy" is orthogonal to those as well? Have so many things changed that privacy is indeed history? On the other hand, in the short story "The Skills of Xanadu", which is another open manufacturing utopia, people had total privacy even in plain sight when they wanted it, out of social conventions and a form of computer-mediated telepathy.
"RE:The Skills of Xanadu online at Google Books?"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/13e85ebf99d0554f
In any case, another implication of your comment is that, for many people, the conceptual goal for open manufacturing in a free society may not need be as high as producing everything we have now (even indoor plumbing?). Just producing enough to support a reasonably free and sustainable society may be a good enough first goal? Anyway, there are bound to be a diversity of opinions on that; I'm just drawing together some themes.
I remain convinced, along the lines of Manuel de Landa, that there is *no* possibility of choice between hierarchy and meshwork, because all systems have both aspects. One can at best talk about balances between the
centralized hierarchies and grassroots meshworks in different situations.
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't in fact a group of smart men behind the scenes running the show. That the face put forward as stupid politicians is just that.
Any Google on "exponential growth human population" or "failure understand exponential growth" will help illustrate what we're looking forward to. It will be in our lifetime where the population will grow beyond the ability for the state to police it using just human manpower (police-person). Very soon maintaining civil order will require automation. It already does.
Whomever is running the show does seem to understand and are taking steps necessary building the infrastructure we're going to need in 25-50 years. And a 25-50 year build-out for infrastructure is about right. The ratio of citizen to state will easily rise to hundreds of thousands to one. Cameras are needed, the ability to mass collect people will be needed.
Anyone familure with the courts already know. If 100% of the population demanded jury trials the system would collapse. The only way they're able to hold it together is that +90% plea to "lessor" charges. The courts are already like the Airline industry as in hurdling cattle. When the population doubles even this stop gap measure won't be enough.
This automation of state control is evidence to me that either the politicians aren't as stupid as the face they put forward or there is a group behind the scenes running the show that do understand exponents.
-[d]-
Thats correct, I miss the point because there doesn't seem to be one. I suppose I could just move to NK if you think I'll find it there, but its your argument not theirs. You can pat yourself on the back all day for being better than other people because you cling to your ethnocentric cultural superiority of cold war America, McCarthy, Hoover, Hogans Hero's reruns, and best of all we're always the good guys. NK is a living hell, just like you know and love it - its the good ol days. Believe me, I'm not trying to convince you to move to NK, as you suggest, I'm just saying the list is arbitrary and seems to reflect US cold war prejudice more accurately than it even substantiates "Electronic Police State" criteria. The four countries on the top of the list are there because why exactly? What is the metric? Belarus and NK but not Estonia and Latvia and Ukraine and Bulgaria? WTF? Just make up any ol list for any old reason for all I care, but the only country that we need to fix is our own. So far, ideology is cheap when its all your own, but I'm convinced people are people everywhere and that North Koreans feel the same way about creepy electronic surveillance as any other people on planet earth. Since we seem to be the country where all forms of policing has been excessive, particularly electronic, then how is it that tiny Belarus is considered to be next to China and Russia, but Good ol USA never managed to get around to it? Because you say so? We have more police, more technology, more criminals, prisoners, and felons, more victims, car alarms, phone fraud, identity theft, zombie pcs, wire fraud, etc. etc. than most anywhere on earth so it seems really peculiar to contemplate a list of countries that has absolutely no clear basis of quantifiable fact worthy of mention, and yet it seems to insinuate that our shit don't stink and that we're better because Eurasia is a lousy place to live and we're golden. Whatever. Think what you like, but I bet you don't have the slightest idea what they think about it in China, NK, Belarus, and Russia. You don't even seem to care. So its pointless to use them as a basis for comparison when you are too ethnocentric to realize people are people. Even in electronic police states with no foil hats